


Into the cockatrice den

by sshysmm



Category: Lymond Chronicles - Dorothy Dunnett
Genre: Comfort, Cute, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Crack, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Jerott Blyth inherits an ichneumon, Kid Fic, Post-Canon, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-13
Updated: 2020-02-13
Packaged: 2021-02-27 18:41:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 7,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22700386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sshysmm/pseuds/sshysmm
Summary: Travelling to Malta with Danny Hislop, uncertain of his future there, Jerott Blyth meets a man with a strange bequest.The only problem is, he decided he hated ichneumons, didn't he?--Pure fluff and the crackiest thing I've completed in an age! Mongoose cuddles and healing and domestic Crawford fluff.
Relationships: Francis Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny/Philippa Somerville, Jerott Blyth & Danny Hislop, Jerott Blyth & Francis Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8





	1. Palermo

The port of Palermo was much as Jerott Blyth remembered it. The blue of the sea and the sky were dazzling, blurring into the dry buff brown of the mountains surrounding the bay. The sun was warm on his closed eyelids and upturned face, and a fair breeze carried the scent of salt and tar, worked wood and the piquant notes of passing goods: fish and spices, raw silk and worked leather. If he emptied his mind of thoughts of the journey behind, and the one still ahead, he could almost recall what it felt like to be a man of not yet twenty years, thrilled to deep seriousness by the weight of his mission to become a knight.

He stood by the busy water’s edge, stubborn enough that the stevedores and merchants moved around his planted feet and folded arms. He had not yet regained the uniform of the hospitallers, but his bearing was familiar to the dock workers. They let him wait where he chose while the ship’s cargoes were exchanged for the final part of the voyage to Malta.

Jerott opened his eyes to smile at the twinkling sea and turned, intended to wring some compliment from the wry mouth of Danny Hislop.

His tall, sun-reddened travelling companion was still absent, however. Danny had not been to Palermo before, and had taken himself off to see more of the town. Jerott scowled at the streets overshadowed by Mount Pellegrino, at the gaps between classical columns and houses in the square, white-washed local style. No spruce of strawberry blond curls caught the breeze or the light above the darker-skinned crowds, no lilting, mocking Scots voice powered through the rumble of mercantile activity.

He would have closed his eyes again and turned his face back into the salty air, but his attention was arrested by a man in strange headgear and fine clothes, who was approaching him with a degree of intent. The man carried a woven willow receptacle and a well-travelled leather satchel. There was grime on his hands and a stern, piercing expression in his eyes, though his dress was expensive and its style spoke of vanity. He had a square and well-trimmed beard, red hose that matched the curious folds of the cap perched upon his head, and yet the cuffs of his sleeves were not as white as they might once have been, and revealed brown stains, the origin of which Jerott suddenly, with certainty, feared he could guess.

“Jerott Blyth?” The man gestured with the hand not holding the basket. “My name is Belon,” he introduced himself in Latin, and Jerott’s heart sank.

He shook the hand of Pierre Belon, who was undoubtedly a scholar, and undoubtedly involved in the dissection of any beast fool enough to allow him to capture it and reduce it to its constituent parts - to be rendered into academic Latin for the ready consumption of the intelligentsia.

Jerott took a breath and cut off Belon before he could explain his errand. “I told Gilles I was not interested. I was sorry to hear of his death, and I don’t know what he told you of me, but I am not available for transcription.”

Belon’s dark brows arched and he fixed Jerott with a gaze as sharp as a scalpel. “I have no need of transcription, Mr Blyth,” Belon emphasised Jerott’s civilian title. “I am here on behalf of Antonio Gilles. He heard you were returning to this latitude and saw an opportunity to fulfill one of his uncle’s more…personal requests.” Belon smiled crookedly.

He reached for his satchel with a free hand and proffered the wicker basket to Jerott by its handle, his expression a wordless request for polite assistance.

Jerott took it and frowned at its weight. Before he could tell what was within, Belon retrieved a sealed packet from his satchel and handed it to Jerott, but he did not offer to take the basket back.

Belon ignored Jerott’s glare and stared out at the sea, a predatory glint in his eye.

“The whales, do you see? They follow the fishermen in.”

Jerott turned his head with reluctance. He assumed it was Gilles’s seal on the letter, but opening it one-handed in the breeze was not simple.

Belon sighed. “I should like to examine one, though I have not yet come across a fresh enough specimen. Petrus taught me the importance of quick work,” he glanced at Jerott and the letter expectantly. “So much has been lost, but Antonio and I will publish what we can in his honour. He saw many remarkable things.”

This last part was spoken leadingly, as though Belon hoped that Jerott might describe to him the path that Gilles had found to the old Byzantine world beneath Stamboul’s new glory. As though stories of its destruction by fire and by flood had been grossly exaggerated in order to protect the treasures hidden there. Jerott surveyed the academic twinkle in Belon’s eye and elected to ignore it, snapping open the seal with his thumb instead.

_To Jerott Blyth, my amanuensis in extremis -_

_I expect that by the time this letter reaches you, you will have seen that you chose poorly, and ought to have returned to Italy with me instead of attempting to tame the cockatrice._

_When you live among the untrustworthy beasts you must value loyalty above all. He will remember you, and he will stand by you. He may live a decade beyond me, if you show him kindness and keep him from your wife._

_I shall commend you to the Lord and ask that he aid you with your Latin._

_Petrus Gyllius_

_Rome, June 1555_

Jerott’s throat tightened at the letter’s tone. Gilles had died before Marthe, and would not have known that Jerott had all but left her by then in any case. But the flippant savagery still recalled the worst hurts she had done - and it mocked all of Jerott’s attempts to forget the worst in the wake of her death. He read it again, and in that moment hated both of them, Gilles and Marthe, and what they had done to his life.

He wished Belon did not stare at him with such expectation. The man was not a servant or an errand boy, and Jerott felt disinclined to exchange pleasantries about a time that he still thought of with hurt and confusion. He shrugged at the letter.

“‘He’? Who is he? You? Is this Gilles’s idea of a joke?”

Belon blinked and patted the wicker cage. It wobbled unevenly as something shifted its weight within. “No joke, Mr Blyth. The letter refers to the creature inside the basket, not to me.”

Belon stepped back. “My errand is done! Antonio will be so pleased to know you have taken him. I don’t believe they ever saw eye to eye in the way he and Pierre did, but you are perhaps more on a level with him.”

Jerott blinked at the stab of venom in the little man’s voice and watched as Belon slipped away into the busy crowds.

He raised the basket to eye level and peered between its weave. A familiar, musky scent reached him and then the basket’s weight shifted towards him and a pair of yellow eyes glinted. A wet black nose pressed against the wicker and long, fierce fangs were bared as the ichneumon sought to bite its way free of the cage.


	2. Palermo ii

“Go,” Jerott crouched by the basket, its door open to the rat-infested back streets of Palermo.

The ichneumon’s triangular face protruded, its ears flat to its silken fur. It glanced up at Jerott but it did not leave the basket.

“All right, then stay there,” Jerott hissed at it, knowing the conversation was ridiculous, but driven to it by a growing anger at Gilles’ gesture. He stood and glared down at the animal, reminded all over again of that nightmarish journey from Aleppo. If the creature did remember him - which he strongly doubted - it ought to remember that his sword was sharp and heavy, and he did not have the patience of the ichneumon’s accustomed master. He had certainly told Gilles that he never again wanted to hear or smell the massacre of _rodentia_ by his bedside in the night.

The ichneumon took a couple of steps out of the basket, still looking up at Jerott. Its fur rippled as it moved: grey and brown and black framing the devilish yellow eyes.

Jerott shooed it and it did not even blink at the gesture.

“Hullo Maeve, we’re at the back alley transactions again already?”

Danny Hislop leaned his long form against the dwelling at the mouth of the alley and smiled angelically at Jerott and the ichneumon. “She’s a fair one, but I think she’s out of your budget, Jerott.”

Jerott sighed, turned from the basket and the animal, and shouldered his way roughly past Danny.

“Why yes, apparently she - _I’m sorry, sir_ \- he thinks you still owe him something.”

Turning amid the bustle of the docks, Jerott stared back at Danny. “What are you talking about?” His black brows were drawn in a furious frown, he shook his head in disgusted exasperation. The shallow reserves of his forbearance were already exhausted by the letter and the interaction with Belon, and Danny’s playfully monotonous mind held no relief for him.

Danny, nonplussed, pointed at the ground between them.

The ichneumon had emerged from the alley, and paused with its nose to the air and its long, whip-like tail held up behind it. The preoccupied people who buffeted Jerott as they went past at their business did not look at their feet, and would not easily have spotted the dusty brown mongoose against the dusty brown ground.

It skipped a few paces this way and that to avoid heavy boots, the inquiring snouts of pigs passing by, and trundling, hand-pulled carts.

Jerott, despite all that he had seen of violence in his life, felt his stomach flip guiltily: he did not want to witness the creature be crushed before his very eyes. He took a step back in its direction and grunted as a man bent double beneath fathoms of folded cloth knocked into him.

“Hey!”

Jerott swore after the man and bent to the ichneumon, making shooing gestures. “Go on! Get out of here.”

It danced aside as Jerott was buffeted again, and he extended a boot, thinking to nudge the creature in the direction of the quiet edge of the street. The ichneumon saw the gesture in a somewhat different light and accepted it readily, clambering up Jerott’s foot and hose, hooking its claws in silk and wool and scaling him like he was a hawthorn tree.

Cursing and trying to avoid the people around him, Jerott struggled to return to Danny in the alley’s mouth, with the ichneumon now precariously perched on one of his broad shoulders.

Danny was standing, fully supported by the wall, his arms tight across his chest, his eyes screwed shut and mouth wide with noiseless mirth. His cheeks were red from sun and laughter, and his curls shook on his freckled forehead.

“I don’t know where you got that thing from, but you must keep it. For my sake,” he gasped between gulping breaths.

Jerott reached for the ichneumon on his shoulder and it moved behind his head, coiling its tail around his throat. Its claws gripped his clothes ferociously and it stuck a curious nose into his hair. Any attempt to move it would result in ripping and scratching. Jerott sighed and instead tried to pluck its tail away from his chin. He succeeded only in making the ichneumon draw closer.

The ship ought to have been readied for the next leg of the journey, and they turned into the flow of people passing, not fighting it this time, but negotiating its currents until they came to the boarding ramp.

Jerott still declined to explain the creature, and the Captain did not ask, so Danny followed him on board with his customary aspect of jovial inquisition. The animal was a pretty little thing, he thought, and seemed the perfect outward expression of Jerott Blyth’s farcically serious contradictions.

“The must-have Italian accessory,” Danny stroked its fur speculatively with the back of one finger. “What are the sumptuary laws on Malta?”

“Irrelevant. It’s staying on this ship or it’s going in the sea,” Jerott muttered, plucking again at the tail forming a choke-hold on his neck.


	3. Birgu

“So they swim? What did you say it was again?”

Jerott looked down at the bedraggled creature standing at his heel on the white stone of Birgu. The ichneumon shook itself and its particoloured fur stood up in dark spikes. It blinked round yellow eyes at him and then sat to groom itself while the rest of the party stood still about it.

“It’s an ichneumon,” Jerott said hollowly. “It belonged to a scientist called Gilles, who I met…I met in Aleppo.”

Danny allowed a shadow of thoughtfulness to pass over his expression. “When you were searching for the child of our Sweet Commander?”

Jerott glared at him sourly. “Yes.” The creature had swum from the boat and struggled up mossy steps. It seemed blithe, but its flanks moved quickly with its breath, and he supposed it must be hungry. He bent to scoop it up and, ignoring Danny’s raised brows and delighted smile, tucked it into his satchel.

“So,” Danny swung his arms as he walked and squinted up at the grim aspect of the fortified town. “The ichneumon follows you like we follow Francis. Are we mere beasts, or is the animal more noble of intent than we can possibly know?”

Beneath the familiar walls and towers Jerott was already caught in a swirl of nostalgia and nausea whipped together. He gripped Danny’s arm and stopped him. “Please. Enough,” his breathing was heavy and his hold on Danny was tight. He was confused by the smell of wet musk and the protectiveness he had not meant to feel towards the ichneumon in his bag. He was beset by memories of Gabriel and of Lymond, of his own grief on his first journey to the island, and of how strange and straightforward that mourning seemed to him now. “Please.”

Danny reached across his own chest to cover Jerott’s hand with his. His pale eyes, behind their near-white lashes, relented and showed some care. “Do you want to go on alone? I can find my way around the town and its walls myself, and meet you at the hostel later.”

Jerott nodded, silent with gratitude and the hard lump of emotion at his throat. He turned and walked up the familiar angle of the slope, feeling his calves pull and his thighs work in ways they had once learned not to, when the road had been familiar. The bag at his side vibrated and shifted as the animal inside cleaned its fur and rubbed itself dry on his belongings. Jerott slipped a hand inside the satchel, stroked the ichneumon, and took comfort from the sensation.


	4. Birgu ii

The meeting with de la Valette had gone about as well as he could have hoped. The assumptions that had been made about him were put more delicately than they had been by Leone Strozzi, and Jerott had managed to assert that if he had sinned in thought or in deed he would openly and willingly unburden himself during confession. He had made no promises he did not think he could keep, and he had admitted his lack of imagination in returning to familiar haunts with as much good grace as de la Valette’s sharp questions allowed him.

When the ichneumon had intruded, sniffing with interest at the sweetmeats and grapes on the Grand Master’s desk, Jerott had been surprised to find the pressure of examination ease. De la Valette’s ample brows rose and he stroked his moustache thoughtfully. “And you carry about your person the slayer of basiliks?”

Jerott gathered the wandering animal and tried to return it to his satchel. Failing, he settled with it held on his lap, his two hands wrapped gently around its small, shivering form. “I apologise. It was left to me by a friend. I intended to release it on the harbour front.”

“Your friend left you a gift, and you would abandon it on the docks?”

Jerott looked at the ichneumon in bafflement, then up at the Grand Master’s inscrutable expression. “It’s just an animal.”

“Why is it in your bag?”

He blinked, and tried to formulate a response that did not sound insane. “I left it on the ship, but it swam,” Jerott swallowed when he looked up at de la Valette. He was empty of explanation.

The Grand Master let out a puff of breath, a French expression of equanimity on his poised lips. He instructed Jerott to keep the creature, as the rats had been emboldened since the tornado some summers past.


	5. Birgu iii

Jerott sat in the mottled shade behind a small and quiet hostel, feeding the ichneumon morsels from his plate, holding out grapes and dried fruit on his hand for the animal to take. It quivered nose to tail as it ate, its four black feet planted on the scrubbed table top.

What was he to do with this creature? He couldn’t take de la Valette at his word, surely? Gilles may have imagined the ichneumon in a merchant-house in Lyons, getting under Marthe’s feet and hunting mice in the stores, but Jerott was returning to a different life altogether. Ten years, Gilles had said! Jerott had no idea whether he himself would see ten more years fighting here.

Although he resented any duty of care towards it he found that watching it still made him smile. It reminded him of the fondness with which the old scientist had held him - despite Jerott’s enduring foulness of mood at the time. And when it wasn’t eating rats at his bedside it had a certain charm that he could not deny.

Without a shred of self-consciousness, he laughed at the feeling of the ichneumon’s teeth grazing his skin and at the exaggerated manner of its chewing: its eyes screwed shut and its whiskers protruded at many angles. It licked his palm when it had consumed what he had held forth and then looked about it with the expectation of more.

Jerott stroked his hand down the animal’s long back and felt its muscles move beneath, its small shoulders shrugging at the pressure. It licked its lips and gazed at Danny as he sat down, in a way that Danny pronounced to be thoroughly unnerving.

“Do you suppose it thinks I’m the next course?”

“I’d never call you a rat, Danny,” Jerott folded his arms and leaned back in his seat. The ichneumon proceeded to filch the crumbs from the table and to lick Jerott’s empty platter.

“And yet, I feel I have already been replaced in your affections by this beast,” Danny sniffed. He unfurled a tentative arm and prodded the ichneumon with his fingertips. He retreated swiftly when it revealed its needle sharp teeth, but the threatening gesture turned into a wide yawn.

The ichneumon scratched its ear with a hind paw and hopped down from the table to examine the floor for additional leftovers.

“He does smell better than you.”

“That is a vile slander,” Danny gazed hopefully at the door of the hostel. “I wash my skin with rosewater and oil of lavender at least once a year. The madame of the finest bawdy house in the Lowlands said she’d never encountered a man of such angelic fragrance as myself. Look - are you going to call me some food or do I have to find my own?”

Jerott glanced at the ichneumon as it scuttled about in the shade, but stood and feigned indifference to its activities. “Maybe it will be gone by the time I’m back,” he said in an uncertain tone as he pushed the door to the hostel and disappeared within.


	6. Birgu iv

The ichneumon became a fixture of his life before Jerott even knew what life on Malta was to him then. It would take time for the island to feel like home. For months he remained ill at ease within the city walls, expectant of meeting the imposing form of Graham Reid Malett in every street and building. He did not wear the uniform of a knight, having deferred his vows, and he boarded with Danny in civilian lodgings - the owner of the hostel was adamant that the ichneumon kept his house free of evil as well as lizards.

In the hostel, Jerott’s cot was close to the window, and he had grown unused to the bright Mediterranean sky: it was filled with stars that would have been obscured by Scottish or French cloud. He lay awake, sometimes longing for wine, sometimes for Marthe, sometimes for other things he did not dare examine. Whatever kept him from relaxing, the ichneumon curled blissfully on his belly or against his shoulder and neck. It enjoyed the feeling of his hand running over and over its soft fur, his fingers absent-mindedly probing beneath the top layer to scratch at its under coat. It rolled against him, revealing its warm abdomen for him to ruffle or rubbing its chin against his chest in contentment.

It learned, through being shut out of the room on a number of nights, that midnight feasts were for the corridors - not for the underside of Jerott’s bed.

With enough time, with enough sightings of the black-haired officer riding the streets of Birgu with his familiar, Jerott ceased to be known as the man who had been most under the sway of Graham Reid Malett. The knights stopped talking only in terms of the faithless romantic who had cast aside his vows in order to pursue a mercenary and his bastard child into the very jaws of the Turk. They no longer mentioned his marriage and the mercantile years spent in Lyons. Jerott Blyth was content to become simply le Chevalier au Mangouste.

Those who spent their lives between prayer and war were inclined to superstition and the adoption of mascots and heralds. The ichneumon was welcomed as their little warrior, to be put to use where snakes, mice or any other infestation needed to be rooted out. The ichneumon was neat and brave and loyal, just as a servant of the Lord ought to be. If it was guilty of the sin of gluttony, well, the knights were happy for it to gorge itself on the city’s pests; if it succumbed to sloth, at least it was always charming, whether curled in a cross-patterned cloak or cradled in the unlaced front of Jerott’s doublet.

It was not difficult to accommodate the ichneumon in his life. By and large it ate what he ate - and caught any supplements it desired. Jerott did not call it to his side, it simply chose to follow him and climb aboard his back and shoulders. He did not name it, he did not speak of it or to it. It did not care if he conversed with it or claimed it by a title: it was a mercenary beast, and in that he thought he recognised himself.


	7. Djerba

Danny Hislop walked gingerly down corridors lined with bodies - many of which were ominously still. The sound of the place was deafening, like a looming storm moaning in the ginnels and backstreets of a town; Aeolus trapped inside the sturdy square walls erected by the Order of St John.

Now and then he paused, and reminded himself that the floor was steady, it was only his legs that thought he was still at sea. The injured and the dying, borne away from the carnage off the coast of Djerba, seemed to him to cluster against the hospital walls like debris tossed on the foam. They smelled of the sea still, beneath the tang of iron and the sweet smoke from censers hung above the doorways.

Danny did not bother calling his friend’s name. Some of the feverish, failing men at his feet would have answered to anything just to take a moment of comfort. Instead he followed the creature he had loosed into this maelstrom, which moved slowly, trotting in zigzags from body to body.

The ichneumon sniffed at blood and sweat, its ears pressed firmly back against its head and its tail held still and high. In quieter parts of the hospital it stopped and looked back at Danny, and Danny could not believe that he really saw accusation in its features - but he did believe he deserved to see it. It led him, inevitably, to the high-ceilinged main ward, where rows of soldiers lay on cots raised from the cold ground, their groaning and shouts of pain more urgent than that of the men in the corridors.

Danny grimaced at the entrance until a physician shoved him aside. The smell of blood was stronger, clearer in here: it did not smell like a battlefield at all to him because the underlying notes of dust and mud were missing, replaced by the false promise of astringent herbs and perfumed steam. He lost sight of the ichneumon as his eyes roved over injury after injury, white cloth stained every shade of red.

A ruckus began every few minutes, when a reluctant patient had to be relieved of a malignant limb, or an embedded piece of exploded ship or canon shot. It took Danny a while to notice that one disturbance was of a different nature: several monks shouted at once instead of the man on the bed they surrounded. Their arms raised to the air, one brandished a reddened blade.

“Begone, pestilential beast!”

Danny burst into their circle with hope on his face, shoving the physicians aside.

On the disordered and crumpled linen lay a man with a great deal of bandage on his thigh. Red, bright and clean as poppies, spotted the clean binding already, but all four of his limbs were still attached to his body. His hair was black on the pillow, dry from sea salt and invisibly stained by the soot that covered his brow and cheeks. His eyes were closed and his expression was not quite comfortable, but around his neck coiled the tail of an ichneumon, and its body lay by his head on the pillow so that it could groom his hairline fastidiously.

The ichneumon’s long pink tongue lapped at the grime and sweat on Jerott’s temple, and his pained expression warred with a smile, and his hand groped weakly for the animal’s soft fur.

A monk reached for the creature, intending to remove it, and Danny swatted him back. He positioned himself at Jerott’s bedside and gestured to the other men to return to their business.

“Reinforcements have arrived, lads. Go and see to someone who needs you more - the ichneumon and I have this under control.”

Jerott cracked open one dark eye with painful effort. His laugh was dry and near-soundless, but it made Danny smile goofily in return.

“Good. I was worried you’d leave the bloody creature to me next.”

“Other way around,” Jerott croaked. “He’d be looking after you.”


	8. On ship

The high seas did not appear to agree with the ichneumon. Jerott had looked forward to the journey: the cold mist of the Atlantic had become a subject for nostalgia, and he felt spoiled by the lapis blue of the Mediterranean - a sea somehow less real than the iron-cold northern waters of his youth.

On board, he had remembered his reasons for travel, and had repented and cursed himself before they were even a day’s sail from Gibraltar. There was no Danny to make him certain of his conviction to go back to Scotland, for Danny had travelled overland on business of his own (a matter of payment owed to a former mistress - Danny had left with an uncharacteristically chastened appearance). Instead there was just the wide grey sea and the autumnal mist, and an ichneumon that had lost its once prodigious appetite for ships’ rats.

There was no one to admit it to, and he would not have done so anyway, but Jerott was both glad of the distraction from his own worries and deeply fearful for the creature that had been his companion - now for several long years. The ichneumon would not eat and so lacked energy. Its fur, usually soft as silk beneath the long, striped quills of its overcoat, grew brittle and its skin flaked drily when his fingers disturbed it. Its black shiny nose was dull and warm, and it wanted to do little other than sleep inside the unlaced front of Jerott’s doublet.

It drank water from Jerott’s fingertips, licking the drops without its usual completist precision, and, at some persuasion, he managed to see it take a few stringy pieces of cooked chicken, perhaps once a day.

The other men on the ship watched these activities with combined pity and awe, and a good measure of bemused merriment. To them, Jerott was strange and serious traveller with a quick temper towards other men, but seemingly endless patience for the sickly animal he carried - tested, he proved able to use both dagger and fists remarkably effectively, even with one hand protecting the bundle in his doublet and the stiffness of an old wound carried in his leg. The sailors and travellers on board understood then that this entertainment was too dear for their liking. They left the man and his mongoose to their own peace, and amused themselves instead by offering strange morsels of food to try and tempt the creature to eat.

Jerott watched familar coastlines drift past, and listened to the gulls and the endless, restless sea. He warmed one hand against the animal asleep in his clothes and his mind stumbled accidentally into the realisation of his gratitude to Gilles. The old man had recognised, on some level, what it was that Jerott needed and struggled for.

The ichneumon trusted him because it did not know not to. It made him responsible for its well-being because he would not be responsible for harm that came to it. He could not say its affection was unconditional - Jerott fed the creature and provided warmth on clear winter nights - but it was simple. Simply won and simply held, a balm for the soul provided by a creature that was not supposed to possess one.


	9. Leith

“Is the leg still bad?” Archie Abernethy gestured to Jerott’s careful movement as he took the pack he was handed from the ship’s side.

Jerott disembarked with a shake of his head and peeled the open collar of his doublet back a little. “No. Yes - sometimes. It’s this, though. If anyone in Scotland knows what’s wrong with it, it must be you?”

Archie’s beetle-black eyes glittered and his forehead furrowed as he leaned over to peer inside Jerott’s clothing. His brows shot up and he gave Jerott a look of awed curiosity.

“Where did ye get that?”

Jerott’s nose twitched and he grimaced with guilt. “It belonged to Gilles. He left it to me.”

Archie nodded slowly. “Aye, did he? Pierre Gilles left you his ichneumon?”

“I suppose I did help him dissect a giraffe,” Jerott shrugged apologetically.

“There’s no call for boasting,” Archie clucked and reached an enquiring hand out. Jerott drew the ichneumon from his doublet, its body coiled and shaking and much lighter than it had been.

Jerott tried not to flinch as he watched Archie’s worn brown hands pull back the animal’s lips, poke at its eyes and ears and pluck at its fur. He answered the questions he was asked, worrying about not providing enough, or the correct information - when ill or injured he knew his own body with absolute certainty, but what did he know of this animal’s feeling?

The smile Archie gave him was encouraging, though. “It sounds to me like ye’ve been doing a fine job of nursing it yersel’ or it wouldna have got this far. I’ve something I reckon might help the infection. Keep him where he was in the meantime.”

Jerott replaced the ichneumon inside his clothes and mounted the horse Archie had brought him. It was a crisp, sunny day, the best of Scottish autumn and a perfect time for travelling. The low sun lent the hills and yellow-leaved trees the colours of precious metal, and the heady, comforting scent of wood-smoke travelled far on the breeze. Within Jerott’s doublet, the ichneumon was, for the first time in days, roused to curiosity, and sampled the air with the tip of its nose.


	10. St Mary's

Bemused by the chatter and the attention, distracted from the rich broth he had been given by the mug of heather beer he kept trying to sample, prevented from this by one questioning voice or another, Jerott had never felt more like a conquering hero than he did in the vaulted stone room at St Mary’s.

Philippa Crawford, mistress of the house, sat at the table with him in intermittent bursts, her laughter quick, her interest lively, and her attention always simultaneously held in three other places. She was radiant in silks of russet and marigold, arrayed in rubies and amber that flashed reflections from the fire each time she moved. Frequently, mid-sentence (hers or Jerott’s), she would spring to her feet and fuss with the hearth or the oven or one of the children arrayed at their feet.

The eldest, Diccon, had a book and a whistle in his lap and an expression thirsty with curiosity. A daughter, Sibyl, sat serious and silent with her own well-pawed tome, staring at Jerott in an uncertain manner, and the youngest, a dark-haired lad called Gideon, held himself on wobbling legs, his small hands securing him upright, one on the table’s edge and the other on Jerott’s knee.

The child’s fist gripped the wool of Jerott’s britches, but he did not dare to reach out to the animal lying so close. The ichneumon wore the aspect of one enjoying complete relaxation: it stretched long over Jerott’s two thighs, its forepaws thrust before it to either side of its resting chin. It yawned often in the heat from the hearth and twitched its ears at the children’s voices. Archie’s cure had been quick to work, and though the animal was still lighter than it had been, it had recovered its gloss and its personality.

When the heavy oak door behind Jerott opened with a fresh gust of air, the room itself seemed to draw an expectant breath. Three young voices squealed with delight, and the ichneumon raised its head and fluffed up its considerable coat of fur. Jerott twisted in his chair and Philippa reddened with pleasure at the sight of her husband.

Francis Crawford was beaming from ear to ear, his cheeks spotted with a healthy pink the colour of dog roses, the ripe corn silk of his hair disarrayed by the cap he had just removed, and his blue eyes bestowing glee on all those they settled on.

Jerott’s heart descended into his stomach then seemed to leap to his throat with equal rapidity. His legs tensed on the instinct to stand and the ichneumon dug its claws into him in anticipation of movement.

Francis’s smile shifted from the general to the personal, and he laid a gloved hand on Jerott’s shoulder as he stepped inside the room.

“Stay, stay. I would not disturb you or the valiant Herpestes.”

Jerott gawped up at him, then stroked the ichneumon climbing to his shoulder out of absent-minded habit. “Herpestes?”

Of course Francis had remembered the bloody thing’s name and Jerott had not, though Jerott had travelled alongside it for weeks and Francis had encountered it but once.

“Is that its name, Jerott?” Diccon asked, with every echo of his father’s wit; with his mother’s steady brown eyes, owlish beneath the perfect golden curls of his fringe.

Jerott stared at Francis, who shrugged as though to say this was a problem Jerott ought to have anticipated. He pulled his gloves off and set them down before hoisting Gideon into his arms and bending to bring his due kisses to Philippa’s cheek and lips.

“It doesn’t have a name,” Jerott told Diccon. It might as well be true - he had not used Gilles’s name for it over the past years and did not intend to begin doing so now. It made him feel uneasy, as though he would finally be sealing a contract with the old man - admitting to all of his mistakes and Marthe’s.

Indeed, naming the beast anything at all felt like it would be an admission of what it had come to mean to him. Jerott was decidedly uncertain that he wanted to make such an admission.

But the boy’s expression spoke of his distaste, his soft brow dimpling in a frown. Diccon did not articulate his judgement aloud and simply turned to his book.

His little brother had fewer compunctions. Gideon removed a sticky fist from his mouth and clamped it on his father’s fine velvet doublet. “It must have a name!” he exclaimed.

“Must it?” Jerott winced.

Philippa smiled and offered him no reprieve. “Oh, absolutely. How else would you tell your ichneumon from all the others?”

Imperceptibly, with the return of Francis, Jerott felt that the tide of the conversation had turned. He was trapped on the shore, uncertain and cut off from safety.

“I don’t believe they are as commonplace as cats…”

Diccon tutted and looked up from his book. “You _must_ have a name for him!”

Francis hid his broadening smile in Gideon’s hair, dandling him lightly in his arms. He glanced down at Philippa, whose own expression was as satisfied as that of a hearth cat.

Jerott was quite unused to being lectured to by the under tens, and met Diccon’s eyes with helpless silence. At last, the little girl rose from her seat on the woven carpet. She checked something in her book, and Jerott realised with a strange thrill of horror that it was written in looping Arabic script.

Sibyl approached him with features he dimly remembered: she was the very image of Francis’s little sister, Eloise. Her cornflower blue eyes sparkled as though she knew some private joke none of the others understood, and her smock was stained with ink and vermillion. She raised her hand to stroke the ichneumon, and Jerott brought it down from his shoulder for her to reach. It curled in his big hands, its long whip tail arcing around his forearm, and it sniffed at the air as her hand descended to it.

After a moment’s contemplation, Sibyl leaned close to the creature with her hand cupped to her ear. She looked up at Jerott and said decisively: “He says his name is Bulukiya.”

It was a name from one of the fireside legends they liked to tell along the Moorish coasts, in Berber huts and in opulent seraglios. Jerott had never expected it to be a name he heard on the lips of a Scottish child.

“I don’t think…” He began, wary of the assertive tilt to Sibyl’s chin.

“Now, children,” Francis intervened smilingly, hoisting Gideon higher and pacing before the fire. “Have you forgotten the story of the cockatrice? What is the mongoose famous for?”

“Fighting the basilisk!”

“He should be called Herakles!”

“No, Fráech is the braver!”

Francis laughed at Gideon’s protesting tone.

“ _Gluaiseas Fraoch, b’e fear an áigh_

_Bhuain a shnámh air an loch_

_Fhuair a’ phéist is i ’na suain_

_Is a ceann suas ris an dos_.”

“It doesn’t have a happy ending though, does it, son?” He touched his nose to Gideon’s before glancing down at Diccon and Sibyl.

“Children, have you not omitted the most evident of examples? _Frustra fit per plura, quod potest fieri per pauciora_.”

Diccon turned his affronted frown on his father. “But Da, you said if the answer was simple enough that every man in the room reached for it, it was either a royal decree or _full crafty conspiracion_.”

Philippa grinned at Francis’s exaggerated expression of astonishment. “Treachery! My own flesh and blood! Quoting me at myself!”

“I should say the naming of an ichneumon requires a royal decree, or the nearest this household can get to one,” Philippa, standing, took Gideon from Francis’s arms and snuggled against him.

“Conspiracy it is, then,” Francis shrugged at Jerott, who remained sitting at the centre of this linguistic whirlwind, the beast under discussion still wriggling in his hold as Sibyl stroked it and chuckled.

While Francis and Philippa questioned Diccon on which of the feats of Herakles was the best, Sibyl took a step closer to lean against Jerott’s leg. She looked up at him and pinned him beneath all the gravity that a five-year-old could muster.

“Mr Blyth,” she said very quietly. Jerott offered her a smile that he hoped was reassuring. “He should be called George. I think I misheard him when he told me it was Bulukiya earlier.”

“George?” Jerott repeated, his smile turning crooked and broad. “Isn’t that a bit English?”

Sibyl blinked regally and raised her chin. “Da’s always meeting with the English, I don’t see why that’s a problem.”

Jerott’s laughter was immediate and delighted, and caught Francis’s attention.

“What lies are these?”

Philippa released the struggling Gideon, who raced back to Jerott’s side now that his sister had proved the ichneumon and its owner friendly. Philippa wrung her hands briefly in the silk folds of her skirts and looked as fondly worried as Kate Somerville had done over the wreckage of a precious sapphire brooch.

“Oh Sibyl, we must have a chat about the sacrosanctity of the secret services.”

Sibyl paused to parse this and shook her head. “No, Mummy, he can’t be a Saint, he’s an ichneumon.”

With determination, she pulled herself up into Jerott’s lap and he moved the ichneumon back to his shoulder so that Gideon could sit on his other knee.

Sibyl curled against his chest without further preamble. “Unless you say he is, Mr Blyth?”

The ichneumon sniffed at the children’s heads and settled against the back of Jerott’s neck. Jerott gave the question a moment’s more thought than he had meant to.

“I, no. After all, he’s not a martyr, and he is definitely not an ascetic.”

“George the ichneumon may prove to be a mystic of the highest order. Let’s not rule it out,” Francis smiled toothily down at Jerott, stroked the heads of George, Gideon and Sibyl, and even, given Jerott’s full hands, got away with a gentle chuck beneath his friend’s chin.

Jerott laughed.

“George. Gilles would hate it. But it suits him.”

Francis let him rearrange the children on his knees and then handed Jerott the mug of ale that stood abandoned on the table. With a dull clink of pewter on pewter, he touched it with his own drink. “He is as he is because of you, Jerott. A credit to your pastoral care.”

“I think,” said Jerott carefully “That George has been the one to take care of me.”

The look bestowed on him was one such as he had always craved: recognition and regard, pleasure and pride. Francis made a subtle sound of assent, and met Jerott’s eyes with understanding.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the Coverdale Bible: Isa. xi. B _He shal put his hande in to the Cockatryce denne._  
>  Bulukiya is from the _1001 Nights_ , he travels through the land of the serpent queen; Herakles fights Ladon for the apples of the Hesperides; Fráech is killed stealing rowan berries from a dragon in Irish myth (recorded in the Book of Dean of Lismore). Francis quotes from this, the translation (from [here](https://sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/cdm/cdm04.htm) is:  
> Sir Fraoch moved forward to his fate  
>  Forth to the lake and swam the tide;  
> He found asleep the dragon-snake  
>  Around the tree, mouth open wide.  
> George is George of Lydda, the English saint.  
> Francis is also caught quoting William of Ockham: 'It is pointless to do with more what can be done with fewer.'  
> Diccon is also referencing a time he was paraphrasing William Roy's _Satire_.


End file.
